And so on this one very early morning when his dreams puzzled him until he awoke with them on his mind and spinning to lunacy, he drifted into his dim little office, the still black sky outside darkening the drapes and the windows so night was as night might be just before the morning. No birds sang yet. This was the opaque early morning before dawn when all was silent as dust.
            The idea he had was not a humble one. For a long time he had others, that he might one day write a story that was as memorable as Genesis or Gomorrah, one that would stay in men’s minds forever and ever until all transpired into nothingness or until the brazen blue ice melted south and the world was water again and no one was left to read anything at all, when no one would care, because those few remaining, like a small mass congealed was crushed to the equator finding the forbidden solace there in the tropical fruit that grew like bananas off the trees.
            His ideas at first were more pedestrian, of writers writing and calculating plots and themes subsuming character and character subsuming themes and words of such high regard that others in their reading of them might say, “He is a wordsmith of high order,” and thus he would find in the company of critics, of those who have given their lives to the company of fine words a writer’s ultimate accolade.
            But when he wrote to this end, it seemed but little was possible within the mind of one like he who had first set upon this earth on two legs speaking a foreign language, not English, not Spanish, not French, not Russian, wherein most great ideas revolved like discs that sang the greatest music of man. He was limited, he understood. And after ten years with pen in hand composing and recomposing on stiff yellow legal pads, he had run out of all his talent and grew to resist goals that were beyond his limited reach.
            The idea then was effort, to work beyond normal man’s capacity until in moments of physical and mental exhaustion ideas might come to him as they came in dizzy array to those of incendiary lives, the autistics and manics and depressives and schizophrenics who, born with their disabilities, in their own exhaustion might think the very unthinkable and thus put it to paper in the extreme voices of the unknown and unknowable. Others had used drugs for this to little effect, except in horror, a result not interesting to him. But exhaustion proved limiting, output diminishing during the rapid deterioration of psyche and soul. One evening, in a fugue state when voices rang in his ears and his head thrummed from arterial disintegration, he imagined a world of blood, all rain running red and his thoughts along with it, wasted as lives are wasted in war.
            So he addressed himself to writing for money. It was a temporal pursuit as life is temporal, goods coming to him, embellishing his life. His focus then turned to output, as many words as he could humanly write and then in the morass of these words a spring of wisdom might erupt, wrought so substantially and artistically that it would serve as draught for the human soul. He typed then on fast-clacking substantial Underwood manual typewriters and speeded his output, and then typed again on electric and memory typewriters and on word processors and on desktop and laptop computers. Technology would thus speed his output as if choosing a faster automobile to arrive earlier than others at a given destination. But he found when that proved true, he had less luggage, sometimes not enough to pick through at all. He redefined output, reducing his speed for greater efficiency and less waste. He adopted a formula suitable to his endurance and to the machinery on which he worked. Twenty pages a day double spaced allowed yet time for editing and sustenance when both could be accomplished together, food stains spattering and oiling papers in the first draft, fingerprints soiling that which deserved to be soiled. The mind remained in this fashion relatively open to the desire to clean up the haphazard result of speed. Amidst the millions of words some might stand out and be cherished by others who in the commerce of words, amidst the bundles and bales of black typed text might find within them his work suitable for fair remuneration as was given to those whose acting talents and handsome faces inhabited flat screens in movie theaters. Even in this context, modesty became him. His preference was for those who understood the human heart, who might in the discourse of excellence see tolerable profitability in the gold nuggets delivered in his daily sluice-like flow.
            But it did not happen. All gold remains gold, its travel to usefulness like an inverted narrow funnel, dripping at its end to the one whom with pick and shovel and with bruised hands and wear-torn garments wages battle against elements and interlopers until a sun beam picks up a yellow sparkle amidst the man piles of sand and rock and cruder elements.
            He rested biblically as God did, aware of the glaring errors of creation. There followed the seven years of famine, redefined as hiatus, because that word spoke of choice and put a positive spin on noetic exhaustion. He built a wall, collecting from his yard round stones like agates flicked into circles by children good for things rolling and things round but not for walls, surfaces of tension between flat rock and flatter, held together by weaving and stacking the geometry of gray horizontal planes of shale and schist and chiseled little shim pieces. He set his wall the way he set his art, roundness onto roundness for the bottom-most layer and then a precarious stacking until every idea wobbled on every other.
            He called the dog and hiked into the woods, traipsing cruelly directly up crags and slides over Lilliputian flowers and fauna and indefatigable crawling little ants. This beat his body into lactic submission, the idea to destroy his physical self in preference for a lucid gray matter mind. And when this happened there was thrombosis, the curdling prosaic that God willed to farmers, hewers of wood, and those whose purpose here on this aggravating earth was to willfully take charge of its challenging environment and seasonal redundancy. He bonded with the dog, a pack of two charging into one another’s bodies, brandishing fangs and foaming mouths. The bond of wild exertion replaced food and his senses so long tarnished by civilization became so acute he could uncover the bovine smell of whitetails and the leaf scratches of wild turkey hens and their brood. This left the mind of a mountain man, clever and sly and attuned to the instinctual beings around him. What say, write?  What of?  Of leaf mold, poisonous mushrooms, impudent coyotes, burly black bear, and transitory moose. But what of men, he asked justifiably, and of women?
            Of men, he learned, they read but limitedly, of intrigue, politics, and sports, so he ignored them, writing directly to generic women constructing emotion laden plots and noble characters who, struggling to bond, unlock the imagery of love as it exists in the purity of mind and willful hearts of that sex. He wrote lavishly of passion, romance and ardor.  His words dripping treacle, his characters animated to combustible osculations, he was delirious imagining himself prince-like, the women in his work pining for love and then his love untenably.
            His authentic metabolizing love was thus also available, to real women who waited whirling beneath his cascading waterfall of words in deep turbulent basins of passion and lust. That, of course, would be the final fervid irrevocable method and reason for his work, as blue as the singing ocean, as deep as craggy mountain crevasses, as vivid as flitting orange fritillaries.
            Real women did come, of course, as they do to the soldier whose violent adventurous life is ephemeral, soft coffee-skinned women of warm tropical climates, languid women of basic personality and the exposed shiny skin of heat and humidity; light-skinned harsh European women with high cheek bones of attitude and endurance; and then, ultimately, women of high intellect with artfulness derived from providence as if deposited silt-like from the mighty outflows of generations before them, the matronymic tribes of native Americans and Tibetan Buddhists who, in their social matriarchal wisdom, select one man from among others for their chief, a reasonable man balanced in anima and -mus, whom other men, and women, too ignorant to recognize must obey.
            And thus he would be forced to write as a man speaking to discerning perspicacious women, like the French sensualists, the Paphian secularists, who with selfish carnal thoughts tangled women’s hair, stilling their panting chests and beating hearts. Women, reading his words, would call and write and visit with gifts to his doorstep entranced by the supreme poetry of his ignorant soul. They came first to comfort him for his mindless heartfelt sadness; then to abuse him for his turbid loneliness. He obeyed them, submitting willingly to their feminine fantasies and erotic love. What he could not create, his women created for him, lives, half lives, dreams of tethered obedience.
            And fool he was, thinking life is art lived like life.
            During his inevitable crisis of spirit, he ran in rage to the forest where his animal friend barked in rebuke and remonstrance while he threw his torso against trees, arms upstretched, repeatedly raking his nails and finger tips on course timbered bark, until he fell to the sodden earth, his damaged, bleeding fingers folded into his palms and then pressed under his arms onto his rage hurt chest.  Amidst angry sobbing, he was ministered to in pitiful solace by a licking canine tongue.
            With bandage-wrapped hands he could not type but he could think. Words of value he laboriously came to understand derived from painful purifying shame, when all other pursuits were but a fictive part of art. Pale words were reserved for those who, without confidence, wrote without the integrity of veracious men. He would learn to speak anew, expressing what he really witnessed, from the silly-boned behavior of mortal man.
            When dawn broke, a bird sang, a tiny white throated sparrow perched on a sprig of shapely hemlock, its repetitive yet distinguishable notes, three trebles and a lilting subtonic fading into the thinnish air where its mate listened and swooned and was herself proud to hear this song that was her theme for procreation, for the feathered shaking that in brief seconds accepted spermatic drops to impregnate her viridescent egg.  Because he heard the song that was in his heart and inexpressible, a final purpose for his writing would take him to the end of his lifetime and beyond: for the shining accord of a bluets’ wings, the demarcated pirouettes of dragonflies, and the powerful soaring of eagles, he would labor in reparation for the dim purpose and shame of all those years of false words.
            And thus, the shining sun uprising, his little office snug round him, in mind-grinding truth he pounded with his white bandaged hands in fists of joy, writing the story they would love him for – the story of the honest anomalistic “I.”
  
- The End -